Abit IT7 i845E Motherboard Review - Layout

Abit has long been making quality motherboards that have been noticed by the enthusiast crowd. They have even gone so far as to remove legacy ports from some of their product line as well. Join Asher "Acid" Moses as he checks out their latest offering; namely the Abit IT7. It combines support for the new 533MHz Pentium 4 processors, DDR266 memory and more RAID ports than you can shake a stick at. But can it live up to the reputation that it has garnered in the past? Let's find out!

The IT7 features a slot layout of 1 AGP, 4 PCI and 3 DDR DIMM slots supporting a maximum of 2GB of 184-pin DDR SDRAM. It is great to see that Abit managed to fit 4 PCI slots on the board, as the AT7 only featured 3. That said, due to the amount of integrated features on the IT7, those planning to purchase this board would most likely not be using many PCI devices anyway.

The ATX power connector is well placed so that your power cables do not run over the top of the heatsink/fan unit, restricting airflow. The IDE and Floppy connectors were also logically placed so that they are not in the way of any PCI slots and can be easily reached.

One unusual thing I noticed about the IT7 was that the CMOS battery is seated vertically rather than the horizontal positioning we are used to. The reason for this is that with all the onboard components, Abit had to think of every way possible to save space on the board.

The Northbridge is cooled by a silver heatsink, which is quite unusual for Abit as they often tend to have an active cooler attached to the Northbridge of most of their motherboards. My guess is that it ran cool enough without a fan attached and besides, I'm sure most of you can do without the added noise anyway.